KittyHawk air taxi startup is winding down
wsj.com
wsj.com
I'd rather risk it on an attempt to make self-driving busses. Getting more development money for electric planes is a nice side effect too, but just in terms of improving transit, reducing the need for drivers would be massive.
Labor, not just by drivers but also mechanics and other staff, is a substantial part of transit costs. Cutting fuel cost makes wages a bigger fraction. Reduced maintenance load of an electric fleet could be important.
But that's boring isn't it?
It just reminds me of that old soviet-era joke that goes something like this:
First grade teacher in Moscow: "Kids, today I want to teach you all about how life is great in the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union we have the tastiest food, the most fun toys, the most interesting shows ..."
Kids: "Oh, teacher, that sounds amazing, can we please go visit the Soviet Union?"
The boring company makes something worse than the underground. Evtol is basically helicopters, etc.
One could similarly say there are 60 moments to arrive in an hour. Your appointment could live at the most unfortunate. It seems reasonable to add the average 30 min to the trip again.
If the train stops a lot it might be close to accelerating and decelerating most of the time. It seems reasonable to lose half the possible for speed.
If it doesn't stop a lot it might take a long time to get to the station.
If you need to take 2 trains you might have to wait for the second.
Buses and taxis stop far away from the train and traffic is unpredictable.
No matter how fast the train is, it can still take a long time to get places.
There are countless puzzles left to solve.
From the passenger point of view, you simply plan your travel if the train only comes once an hour. Nobody arrives at random to such an infrequent mode of transportation. Once an hour probably means it's intercity travel.
From the networks point of view: you constantly monitor travel patterns and optimise frequencies, connections, train lengths etc. With driverless trains the trade-offs are fewer, hence you never need to worry about when the next Copenhagen metro comes.
Don’t get me wrong, public transportation is an interesting novelty. But for short trips it’s worse than a car, and for long trips it’s inferior to an airplane. There’s a sweet spot where it works if you’re trying to beat commuter traffic but I’d say that’s about it. The people trying to spend billions to build out these networks have an agenda and frankly I’d prefer if we just fixed our roads and airports.
Obviously if you need to tow something you can’t use the metro, but that’s a very rare need on the whole. Then you take the car, cursing traffic and the parking situation.
Here in Copenhagen you’ll often see carpenters and similar with cargo bikes, so it’s not like you always need a huge SUV to move some tools, or indeed children.
Cars are almost never the fastest way to get somewhere in a city. Americans love them for cultural reasons, not because it’s practical. Like in poor countries cars are a still a symbol of freedom and wealth in the US, most of the rich world has moved on from that mindset.
Re noise, most of the sound comes from the rotors rather than the engine. It's not obvious to me that an evtol craft could significantly improve this.
There seems to be an assumption that evtol == multiple ducted fans. This isn't necessarily the case. And electric helicopter would be evtol. Any specific design is going to have different tradeoffs. Eg more motors to fail.
It seems that it's hyping the idea of having good public transport, but that doesn't address the chicken-and-egg problem, does it? What I mean is, that most cities seem to have mediocre public transport, and people don't want to use it, so proponents of public transport can't get the budgets to improve it, because there's demonstrably low usage. So how do you use a limited budget to "hype and spin" the existing public transport to prove that your particular city would benefit from higher investment in public transport?
The only solution I see is to actually go and set up a new and better route, to prove that your city does in fact have demand for public transport.
Those are some serious costs. The cost of the TGV links in France are definitely in the 10s of billions but no 100s of billions.
Are you sure those budgets aren't getting eaten by consultants or lawyers doing the impact assessments? Even with higher labour costs that is a pretty steep hike.
Actual completion of a project means the money spigot is turned off, which nobody involved wants ever to happen. But sometimes an end is inevitable, and if foreseen, actual delivery of a product might be effected, to save face, as for the case of Finland's nuke.
Very numerous cash-strapped municipal transit projects manage to avoid wasting money. It is well understood how not to waste money when that is actually intended. It is why we can be sure that waste is the whole point on such high-cost projects, better-equipped than others to engage competent management. Ensuring "waste" goes only where intended and not to others must be hard.
https://www.mass.gov/doc/massachusetts-transportation-facts/...
TL;DR: Only Tres Comma Club members will be affected
There's literally a hundred across the globe.
> Hundreds of companies, new ones and legacy aviation players alike, are working on such vehicles—also called air taxis or eVTOLs (short for electric vertical take off and landing). Five such startups have gone public in the past 12 months. They are trying to shape a near future in which taking a flying cab is an economically viable alternative to taking a terrestrial one.
And given how many other externalities there are to hobbyist flying (noise, airports on prime land, etc.) US hobby pilots find their way onto various political committees almost as matter of survival.
It also doesn’t hurt that the average hobbyist pilot is a wealthy white man above 40.
Toss 'em all over the city like Birds and let people zip around in 3-d space lol.
Why have such large vehicles? Think small, think big.
So your claim is that small stores were essentially selected out of existence by customers, but it may in fact be the case that city planners destroyed walkability in a way that left big box stores as the only viable option. Those two things are not the same, as the theoretical “we could have more smaller stores accessible by bike and foot traffic” would be true in the latter case.
For a detailed argument see the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes: https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54
This is why I asked you for a source. We can play anecdote versus anecdote all day. In the absence of a source I’d be very curious what you think of any specific points made in the video.
Is that really a "major" contributor?
You won't be able to call one up to a street corner, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's no money to make. The first thing they'll do is just take the helicopter market and slide the supply/demand curves to wherever they can go at 1/10 of the price. Only when this is done they need to look for completely different models.
The ultra-rich heli market may be small in relative terms, but it's there. Much easier to expand it 100x than to build a new one. And once you do, you're in a good position to try something else - your tech is proven, you have a fleet, you're bringing in cash.
It is hard to believe these will be very much quieter than a chopper.
Another helicopter crash in 2019 suggests another danger. A helicopter crash landed on the roof of a skyscraper and caught fire. The pilot was the only person killed that time, but it took firefighters about an hour to put the fire out. They apparently got it under control without too much difficulty and were lauded for a quick response.. but what if that helicopter had been packed full of lithium batteries? Lithium battery car fires are notoriously hard to put out. Such a fire on the roof of a tall building seems like a serious concern to me.
Hell, the blue led was invented in the 90s, how much would you value the first blue led at?
As for the heli market, the vehicle holds one person, not 2+, and can't fly as far as a heli. But it is less about consumer demand and more about the infrastructure, excessive noise, airspace constraints, and the dozens of other public-facing issues that would arise with any attempt at expanding that market.
Ultralight helicopters are limited to 254 pounds vehicle weight. While that does make it easier to build suitable rooftop helipads without major structural renovations, such aircraft can't be used for air taxi service. It isn't legally allowed, and even if the law was changed they wouldn't have enough load capacity or range to do anything useful.
https://www.planeandpilotmag.com/news/2021/06/14/plane-facts...
We already have flying roads to manage an orderly flow. Air traffic controllers will sometimes hold aircraft on the ground to prevent congestion and maintain the minimum safe separation intervals. At busy airports sometimes aircraft are forced to circle in the pattern several times waiting their turn to land.
Wow. Wonder where all these are?
https://twitter.com/carey_bill/status/1507089714184077322
is highly reminiscent of the coat of arms of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (11th century AD):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Jerusalem#/media/Fi...
I would rather invest in short distance highspeed solution to simplify commuters living in suburbs and stop congesting cities.
Pipedreams?
Rich execs who lost all relations to day to day living?
Taxi are expensive, air taxi adds a trained pilot, airspace handling (permission hell), additional space requirements AND airtaxi maintenance.
All the reasons why I don't fly my own little plain.
The requirements for piloting this being more expensive and bureaucratic than for driving a taxi are a plus because it means you only have to deal with a pilot (well-groomed, stylish, sexy) and not a taxi driver (nasty, smelly, weird accent).
Much like all "privately owned public transit substitute" startups, yes, the target demographic is obnoxious rich people.
Because somebody is happy to give you money for it. That somebody might themselves be getting money from someone else for such a project.
It doesn't have to be viable or lead to a successful business. If you can live the "founder lifestyle" and get a decent salary for yourself and your friends while bolstering your resume (since such failures aren't seen as bad by the industry), a lot of people will be happy to do it.
This happens very frequently in software/SaaS startups but there's no reason it can't happen with physical things.
But in the process of failing in that market, some of these eVTOL companies might create some IP that would be very attractive as an acquisition target for the major aerospace defense contractors. It's probably impossible today to build an air taxi that would meet FAA certification safety requirements while still being cheap enough for profitable operations in US airspace. But it might fit the resupply or medevac mission for ground troops under enemy fire. The military doesn't have to make a profit, and they're more flexible on safety requirements. So it's a long shot but some of these investments might turn a profit.
Personally, I prefer to get in a car, be a couch potato, and when I wake up, I've reached my destination.
It’s a wash to say Beijing to Changsha is better by HSR than plane, given where the HSR stations are (Beijing South was much farther from our apartment than BJS, and Changsha’s HSR station is as far out as its airport). But my wife’s hometown is one HSR station south of Changsha (on the BJ to GZ line) and wasn’t served by an airport, so an 8 hour HSR trip made sense. But now that they have an airport, I’m sure I would just prefer to fly.
Hard to see use cases except for the wealthy.